Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

The invention of the bomb harpoon, the absolute sine qua non of the modern whaling industry and cornerstone of Norway’s first oil age, represented the culmination of all these thoughts on the whale as raw material, on the vessel’s construction, on the animal’s behaviour in the sea, on the properties of the harpoon; the result of these thoughts being considered at one and the same time, in concord, inside Svend Foyn’s head. In the last scene but one, at the moment when the solution dawned on Foyn, actually in the form of a series of inventions springing to mind at the same moment, Jonas Wergeland showed him — which is to say all four Foyn quads — jumping up and shouting in unison: ‘I have it!’ From there Wergeland cut quickly to the final scene in which, like an echo of that cry, the harpoon hit the whale and exploded inside its body with a muffled, yet mighty boom — a fanfare, almost; and that this strike should have been regarded by viewers as a great victory, a climactic shout of triumph, at a time when whaling was so unpopular, proves just what a masterpiece this programme was. The viewers did not see the whale’s death as something bad or traumatic, but as something symbolic: it was not a whale that had been caught, but a difficult and complex concept, a leviathan of the imagination. The passage of the harpoon through the air represented the flight of thought, and the impact with the whale signified the explosive moment of insight.

With a little good will Jonas Wergeland could be said to have laid the foundations of this programme when he was just a boy, in a basement — in the darkness of the deep, you might even say — at the time when his skipping fever was at its height. Before too long, however — he could not have said exactly when, but possibly during the transition from boy to youth — he discovered that he could make his thoughts branch out even without skipping, although it still worked best — and would, in fact do so for the rest of his life — when he had a rope whirling through the air around him, as if this gave him a particularly good charge. Whatever the case: by dint of thought Jonas was forever trying — with or without a rope — to become like a tree, to branch out. Most people strive to become pure and upright, to become pillars, poles, the sort of thing from which to fly a flag. Jonas wanted to be a tree. He often wandered around inspecting the different trees of Norway. When he was at the height of his fame he considered, not altogether in jest, writing his autobiography and calling it My Life As An Oak.

Although Jonas believed that he was really on to something, there came a point in his teens when he put his skipping, or rather: his thought experiments, on ice. He was, if the truth be told, a little alarmed by what he had discovered. On the one hand he felt his gift was a problem. He was afraid that he would never have the chance to use it. That he possessed abilities which would never do anything but confuse him. On the other hand, he hoped that it was only a matter of becoming more mature, gaining more experience. Then he would be able to resume his experiments. In any case, one thing was slowly borne in upon him, the longer he lived: there were possibilities, powers, within the realms of thought greater than anyone could imagine. Sometimes when he was contemplating, ruminating, he was conscious of a kind of mental ‘lift off’, a feeling of acceleration not unlike the ‘boost’ you get in the small of your back in a plane just before it takes off, as it approaches the end of the runway and suddenly picks up speed. In the long process of mankind’s evolution, Jonas knew, we had not got beyond the very beginning. So far, man had only raised his body upright, not his mind. We had no right to our species name. We were Homo erectus and Homo sapiens on the outside, but not on the inside. It was one thing to walk upright, quite another to think upright. To be upstanding in one’s mental life. When it came to awareness, man was still crawling ignorantly around on all fours.

But this line of reasoning was a thing of the future. For many years of his childhood skipping was one of Jonas’s favourite pastimes. He skipped and skipped, as if unconsciously reaching out for something more, reaching upwards. He built shell after shell, layer upon layer around himself with the rope, and one day when he was skipping in the dark in the basement, in the midst of a heart-stopping, minutes-long stint of doubles, just as he felt that something was about to rip wide open, a veil be swept aside, as four or five thoughts which he was pursuing simultaneously began to converge, like the numbers in a combination lock which would suddenly click together to open a set of great, heavy doors — when he was just about there, only an arm’s length away, he passed out.

Jonas came round when his sister switched on the light — having come down to fetch a jar of blueberry jam for pancakes. His forehead hurt, and when he put his fingers up to it they came away with blood on them. He must have struck the brick jamb of the storeroom door as he fell. He would be left with a scar, a pale line intersecting that other scar, his souvenir from the playground skipping game. I’m a marked man, he would think from then on, whenever he looked in the mirror. Although he did not know whether this meant he was damned or that he was to be saved. ‘If you ask me, I think you should do a bit less skipping and eat a few more pancakes,’ Rakel said when she saw her brother’s ashen face and the blood trickling over his brow.

On the way up the stairs, with the aroma of freshly made pancakes making his stomach rumble, Jonas could not help wondering whether there might not be some connection between the two ventures to which he had so far dedicated his life; that there could, in fact, be a link between his ability to hold his breath and his talent for thinking parallel thoughts. Might it be possible to think so well that one could save lives.

Is there anybody going to listen to my story … I sing to myself. Humming it as an intro to what may prove to be my own story. Or an attempt at it, at any rate. I have been inspired by the unlikely fact that once more I find myself here, on board the Voyager , surrounded by stories, layer upon layer of scents, the switches to huge mechanisms in my memory. I kept my mouth shut when Hanna said that the boat had once belonged to ‘a legendary actor’. She was well aware, of course, that I had known Gabriel Sand. Much has changed, though. For one thing, they have installed a four-cylinder Volvo Penta diesel engine. A wise move. Here, among such high mountains, the winds can be everything from insidiously capricious to absolutely non-existent. Voyager is also a grander name than the old one, the Norge . It befits a boat which, by their way of it, is going on a voyage of discovery. Into a new millennium. The Norge was more apt for a vessel which lies safe in harbour and never sets sail.

I had a strange experience out at the point north of Mannheller. I was on deck, sitting on the hatch of the forepeak, taking in the view all around me. I felt a surge of excitement. I could see into three or four fjords at the same time: into Lustrafjord, into Årdalsfjord, into the mouth of Lærdalsfjord and down Sognefjord itself. It was an awesome sight. And yet strangely familiar. I came to the conclusion that I must have come here as a small boy, on the ferry that used to run between Revsnes and Naddvik. That time when we drove all the way to Årdal, a real safari. I realised that this sight must have stayed with me, left its imprint on me. Like the belief that it was possible to look down several channels of possibility at once. I have been to Tokyo, I have visited Timbuktu, I have — speaking of safaris — scratched the backs of rhinos and held crocodiles in my hands, and yet — this short trip up a Norwegian fjord must have made a greater impression. Deeper. It had branched out into me.